Does Your Business Benefit from Influencer Marketing?
Joe SinkWitz left a high-salaried and comfortable career of a marketing executive to create his own startup Intellifluence, the platform, which assists different brands associate with influencers.
The reason: To render small businesses acquire similar type of influencer marketing opportunities, which were enjoyed by large corporations.
SinkWitz explained in a telephonic interview with Small Business Trends that he wanted to provide a service to help small businesses perform like big brands. He, therefore, designed Intellifluence to make it easier for small businesses to link with real people with real audiences and manage social influence campaigns from a single point.
Influencer Marketing Defined
SinkWitz defined the term by saying that influencer marketing means to have someone else explaining the story for you, which includes blog reviews or social media mentions. Nevertheless, the main concern is who the influencer is and what is the goal of the business.
According to SinkWitz, influencer marketing has three forms:
He explained that aspirational approach engages the participation of celebrities and the perfect example would be Kim Kardashian promoting a skincare item. People would watch her and accept her as the role model. They would go for all such products she promotes.
Next is the authoritative and the class of influencer could be either a celebrity or not. The difference from the first type is that they have authority on the subject. He added that authoritative influence exists when somebody you admire as an expert recommends something from their area of expertise.
He explained that the last type works just like peer pressure. You may not need the product, but you feel the need as the peer recommends it. It is keeping up with the Joneses approach.
SinkWitz explained in a blog post these three forms and inscribed that PR is able to fit under the umbrella: evangelist customers spread the word fits: paid spokesmen fits and with your neighbor Sally mentioning your choice of delicious dill pickles on your Twitter account counts.
Intellifluence Powers Influencer Outreach
How Intellifluence Got its Start
Normally, all influence marketing firms are very costly to use. It is because they are outcome of talent agencies, which tend to hire celebrity influencers and repeatedly the same ones.
SinkWitz added that it could cost in so far as $20,000 per month to accept those services, which could be the entire annual budget on marketing for small businesses.
SinkWitz realized that with this type of expenditure, it would be impossible for small businesses to participate in the market.
SinkWitz added what is even more intriguing that by focusing on celebrities, agencies miss as much as 80% of the influencer audience and leave billions behind – in so far as $10 billion in the next 5 years like influencer marketing agency, Mediakix.
In creating the company, he decided to develop Intellifluence on the software as a service (SaaS) model rather than an agency. In the process, he could offer businesses and influencers with a self-service process to interact by removing the requirement for a middle-man or agency resulting in the reduction of the high cost of functioning.
Launched in July, the company is still in the early stage startup mode. Many things about the company have yet to come out and the company relies greatly on customer feedback for that reason.